The present invention generally relates to dynamic web page generation and more specifically to techniques for providing locale-specific services for client-side processing of documents.
The Internet is used globally. Web pages are accessed by many users who understand many different languages. Because of this, it is desirable to present web pages to users in their preferred language. For example, a user who downloads a web page in France may want their web page to be displayed in French; a user who downloads the same web page in the United States may want their web page to be displayed in English.
Traditionally, locale-specific contents are rendered on the server side. For example, when a request is received for a web page, the server renders a web page into a certain language and sends the result to the client. Other locale-specific operations that may be performed include data formatting, linguistic sorting, etc. If many web pages that require these renderings are being requested, the server may become overloaded. Accordingly, the efficiency and speed of serving web pages is degraded.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide client-side processing of locale preferences for displaying web pages and other documents.